U.S. Politics: Death and Tax Cuts

[Gone and Quite Forgotten]

9 minutes ago, Darth Richard II said:

OK Playing catch up here, but um, when did this turn into a sexism discussion? McCain was a sexists dbag in that regards sure but I feel like maybe i Missed a post somewhere?

I think at some point Trump called Angela Merkel "Sugar-Tits" in a tweet and it just kind of snowballed from there.

[Zorral]

Rudy Giuliani attacks Romania for 'excessive' crackdown on corruption:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/aug/28/rudy-giuliani-romania-letter-corruption

1 minute ago, Let's Get Kraken said:

I think at some point Trump called Angela Merkel "Sugar-Tits" in a tweet and it just kind of snowballed from there.

He called his wife a cunt in public and told her to shut up.  Among other events over the years.

[Zorral]

These people these people these idiots:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/aug/28/rudy-giuliani-romania-letter-corruption

Quote

Rudy Giuliani attacks Romania for 'excessive' crackdown on corruption

“An amnesty should be given to those who have been prosecuted and convicted through the excesses,” Giuliani said, claiming “many innocent people” had been jailed.

Giuliani’s remarks aligned him with political forces in Romania who last month succeeded in ousting the country’s top corruption prosecutor, who had pursued senior politicians, prompting tumultuous public protests.

 

[Gone and Quite Forgotten]

1 minute ago, Zorral said:

He called his wife a cunt in public and told her to shut up.  Among other events over the years.

How those family values treating you evangelicals?

[Darth Richard II]

11 minutes ago, Zorral said:

 

He called his wife a cunt in public and told her to shut up.  Among other events over the years.

Yeah I just said he was a sexist dbag...I just don't remember there being any sort of discussion regarding this aspect at all here.

[Zorral]

Quote

 

C.I.A. Officer-Turned-Candidate Says PAC Obtained Her Security Application

Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat running for Congress in Virginia, said that the Congressional Leadership Fund had provided a copy of her security clearance application to the news media.CreditCreditGabriella Demczuk for The New York Times
By Michael Tackett
Aug. 28, 2018

WASHINGTON — A former C.I.A. officer running for Congress accused a super PAC aligned with Speaker Paul D. Ryan on Tuesday of improperly obtaining her entire federal security clearance application — a highly sensitive document containing extensive personal information — and then using it for political purposes.

Abigail Spanberger, the Democratic candidate challenging Representative Dave Brat of Virginia, sent a cease-and-desist letter to Corry Bliss, the executive director of the Congressional Leadership Fund, which has raised more than $100 million to help Republicans in the midterm elections. She demanded that the super PAC destroy all copies of the form and agree to not use the information in any fashion.

“I write as a former civil servant and as an American, in shock and anger, that you have tried to exploit my service to our country by exposing my most personal information in the name of politics,” she wrote.

The super PAC released a statement on Tuesday strongly denying Ms. Spanberger’s charge, saying that the document was obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request filed with the United States Postal Service by America Rising, a separate Republican-aligned research firm.

“C.L.F. follows the letter of the law in examining any candidate’s background and Ms. Spanberger was no different,” Courtney Alexander, a spokeswoman for the group, said in the statement.

The group also released a portion of the security clearance application, blacking out some personal information.

Graham Wilson, a lawyer for Ms. Spanberger’s campaign, said that explanation, which laid the mistake on the Postal Service, did not ring true. “In this unredacted form, this is not a document that the government can provide under the Privacy Act,” he said.

Ms. Spanberger, 39, said in the letter that she had “clear evidence” that the Congressional Leadership Fund had provided a copy of her security clearance application to “at least one news outlet,” adding, “I am not aware of any legal way that C.L.F. could have this document.” In an interview, she said that she suspected that the group was trying to exploit a brief time when she taught at a private Islamic school funded by Saudi Arabia.

The super PAC validated that suspicion in its response, going on at some length to try to link the school — called “Terror High” in an earlier news article — to terrorist activity.

The application was one of two that she completed for government positions, for a law enforcement job at the Postal Service and for her position with the Central Intelligence Agency.

At a political event this month, Ms. Spanberger said she was approached by a reporter for The Associated Press, who showed her a copy of the security form and said the leadership fund had provided the document on a background basis, meaning that the source would typically not be named. The reporter pulled up a copy of the form on his email, and Ms. Spanberger said she was “100 percent” certain it was hers.

The forms ask for detailed personal information about work and health and also include vital data like a Social Security number.

 

This is stuff that IS NOT SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/28/us/politics/cia-officer-house-election-super-pac.html

If I overstepped on the quoting here, I apologize.  However I've seen other posts that did the same thing and nobody objected.  In fact some people asked for the whole thing since they couldn't see it in their own system.

[Gone and Quite Forgotten]

6 minutes ago, Darth Richard II said:

Yeah I just said he was a sexist dbag...I just don't remember there being any sort of discussion regarding this aspect at all here.

Wait McCain did that? I thought we were talking about Trump.

[Zorral]

8 minutes ago, Darth Richard II said:

Yeah I just said he was a sexist dbag...I just don't remember there being any sort of discussion regarding this aspect at all here.

Nope.  He was a pow in an illegal war.  Deify him.

Also, it was quite recent relatively speaking -- not like, you know, way back in time in the 1980's or something, but in the 21st century.

[Gone and Quite Forgotten]

1 minute ago, Zorral said:

This is stuff that IS NOT SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/28/us/politics/cia-officer-house-election-super-pac.html

I remember Republicans openly admitting that they were dragging the Benghazi hearings out because it hurt Clinton's poll numbers. There is truly no shame in their game anymore.

[Gone and Quite Forgotten]

1 minute ago, Zorral said:

Nope.  He was a pow in an illegal war.  Deify him.

Again, the nicest thing I've seen anybody say here is that he's not as bad as the Teabaggers, Nazis, and Russian spies...so essentially he's not as bad as the Teabaggers. Don't see who is deifying him, but keep attacking the straw man.

[DMC]

12 minutes ago, Zorral said:

This is stuff that IS NOT SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/28/us/politics/cia-officer-house-election-super-pac.html

Edit this.  Not only is it an eyesore but it's borderline copyright infringement.

[DanteGabriel]

32 minutes ago, Zorral said:

He called his wife a cunt in public and told her to shut up.  Among other events over the years.

His second wife, whose family money and local connections formed the base of his political career in Arizona. But that doesn't get mentioned by the mythmakers.

[DanteGabriel]

2 minutes ago, Let's Get Kraken said:

This isn't a publishing house dude, and some of us have a limited number of NYT links we can open without subscribing or buying the article. That being said, @Zorral maybe a spoiler tag?

It's actually in the posting guidelines for this forum that you can't paste in whole articles. It should be excerpted.

[Gone and Quite Forgotten]

Just now, DanteGabriel said:

It's actually in the posting guidelines for this forum that you can't paste in whole articles. It should be excerpted.

I know, I edited out my comment.

[Jaxom 1974]

11 hours ago, Mexal said:

Yea, Nelson is probably in the worst situation of all the defending Dems which is nuts to me. Rick Scott sucks.

When on vacation in Florida earlier in the month, watching commercials from Rick Scott laying the blame for the Red Tide crippling the gulf coast summer tourism on Washington and everyone else was painful. I kept thinking to myself, "Maybe it was lobbyists for the sugar industry, but you're the fucking governor of the state, I think you could have been doing something..."

Yeah. That guy sucks.

Are there any decent Republican governors...? And yes, that's a rhetorical question.

[Darth Richard II]

28 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Nope.  He was a pow in an illegal war.  Deify him.

Also, it was quite recent relatively speaking -- not like, you know, way back in time in the 1980's or something, but in the 21st century.

Are you drunk? That isn't what I'm saying at all. And I'm talking about the discussion HERE ON THIS FORUM. There was lots of discussion of Mccain and racism and torture and such, then you started some rant about sexism and I was trying to figure out if I had missed something in context.

[Darth Richard II]

28 minutes ago, Let's Get Kraken said:

Again, the nicest thing I've seen anybody say here is that he's not as bad as the Teabaggers, Nazis, and Russian spies...so essentially he's not as bad as the Teabaggers. Don't see who is deifying him, but keep attacking the straw man.

I didn't even fucking like mccain. This thread has gone off the rails enough now that I'm not even sure who I'm arguing with and over what.

[Bonnot OG]

The Dems are so fucking useless. 
 

 

[DMC]

2 minutes ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

Yeah. That guy sucks.

Are there any decent Republican governors...? And yes, that's a rhetorical question.

Scott's gonna cost a lot of money to beat.  More than I gathered the asshats running Nelson's campaign got when I was there last week.  Gonna stay out of it though - most expensive senate race ever.

[Rippounet]

2 hours ago, DMC said:

Oh, gotcha.  That's a tough thing to prove, or demonstrate.  I think the defensiveness you see is fairly reserved compared to if I, say, denigrated the entirety of the French, or whomever.  It's pretty intuitive to defend your own.  The amount of shit the US takes on this board would never be tolerated if it was any other country.  It's a radical hypocrisy - which I don't mind until it verges into our voters.  Then I'll speak up until someone tells me otherwise.

Yes and no. I think we're in agreement, but I'd like to add that while all countries have nationalist myths whose people will seek to defend, the myth of the "benevolent superpower" is something rather specific to the US at the moment.
To get comparable reactions from others you'd have to find some of their country's nationalist myths. Which could be relatively easy with France I guess, but significantly harder with... say... Denmark or Brazil (random choices).
And of course, the US gets a lot of flak. That's because i) its nationalist myths are very well known outside the US, ii) some of them have to do with foreign policy (the "shining city upon a hill whose beacon light guides freedom-loving people everywhere"), and iii) its foreign policy affects people throughout the world.
And perhaps add iv) this is the modern era, with everyone and their dog having a voice on the internet.

Now I know you said you weren't talking about McCain, but I'm afraid this was the origin of the discussion. I don't think it should be that surprising that people outside the US will not see him as a "war hero" because he fought in Vietnam.
They might even be slightly puzzled by the fact so many Americans still believe there was anything "heroic" about that war.
I mean, seriously, shouldn't that ship have sailed a long time ago?

4 hours ago, Let's Get Kraken said:

First, none of this is in any way unique to America. Almost every nation or state which attains a position of regional or global dominance becomes characterized by imperialistic tendencies and a nationalistic sense of self-importance. 

Certainly. Imperial powers in the past (such as Britain and France) had their own version of the "benevolent superpower."

Often to do with the "white man's burden" too.

4 hours ago, Let's Get Kraken said:

And the other thing that's worth pointing out is just which countries have supported and benefited from American imperialism throughout the latter half of the 20th century. Because really, when we say "American" imperialism, we're talking about a coalition of mostly white countries mostly comprised of North America and Western Europe.

I'm not entirely sure it's worth pointing out... It's not uncommon for empire-states to have vassal-states that benefit from their support and protection.
 

4 hours ago, Let's Get Kraken said:

I think the problem with American exceptionalism isn't so much that it exists, but that it's turned toxic in recent decades. I mean, it used to be kind of a progressive principle, in a macro sense. When tens of millions of people were being killed by in Asia and Europe by fascism and autocratic communism, Americans had this kind of chip on their shoulder, a desire to prove to the world that, yes, our way is better. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, as we've become the single dominant global power, there's been this kind of ideological stagnation within the United States where American exceptionalism has come to be characterized by things like power, wealth, and privilege, rather than by opportunity, democracy, and equality.

You've never heard of the Kirkpatrick doctrine or thought about its implications, right?

I think this paragraph of yours is part of the myth, not reality, and that if anything and as incredible as it might sound, overall US influence may have become slightly less toxic since the end of the Cold War.